(Cross-Post) Build 2016: Azure Storage announcements

It's time for Build 2016, and the Azure Storage team has several exciting announcements to make. This blog post provides an overview of new announcements and updates on existing programs. We hope that these new features and updates will enable you to make better use of Azure Storage for your services, applications and other needs.

Preview Program Announcements

Storage Service Encryption Preview

Storage Service Encryption helps you address organizational security and compliance requirements by automatically encrypting data in Blob Storage, including block blobs, page blobs, and append blobs. Azure Storage handles all the encryption, decryption, and key management in a transparent fashion using AES 256-bit encryption, one of the strongest encryption ciphers available. There is no additional charge for enabling this feature.

Access to the preview program can be requested by registering your subscription using Azure Portal or Azure PowerShell. Once your subscription has been approved, you can create a new storage account using the Azure Portal, and enable the feature.

Near Term Roadmap Announcements

GetPageRanges API for copying incremental snapshots

The Azure Storage team will soon be adding a new feature to the GetPageRanges API for page blobs, which will allow you to build faster and more efficient backup solutions for Azure virtual machines. The API will return the list of changes between the base blob and its snapshots, allowing you to identify and copy only the changes unique to each snapshot. This will significantly reduce the amount of data you need to transfer during incremental backups of the virtual machine disks. The API will support page blobs on premium storage as well as standard storage. The feature will be available in April 2016 via the REST API and the .NET client library, with more client libraries support to follow.

Azure Import/Export

Azure Import/Export now supports up to 8 TB hard drives in all regions where the service is offered. In addition, Azure Import/Export will be coming to Japan and Australia in summer 2016. With this launch, customers who have storage accounts in Japan or Australia can ship disks to a domestic address within the region rather than shipping to other regions.

Azure Backup support for Azure Premium Storage

Azure Premium Storage is ideal for running IO intensive applications on Azure VMs. Azure Backup Service delivers a powerful and affordable cloud backup solution, and will be adding support for Azure Premium Storage. You can protect your critical applications running on Premium Storage VMs with the help of Azure Backup service.

Client Library and Tooling Updates

Java Client-Side Encryption GA

We are pleased to announce the general availability of the client-side encryption feature in our Azure Storage client Java library. This allows developers to encrypt blob, table, and queue data before sending it to Azure Storage. Additionally, integration with Azure Key Vault is supported so you can store and manage your keys in Azure Key Vault. With this release, data that is encrypted with .Net in Windows can be decrypted with Java in Linux and vice versa.

Storage Node.js Preview Update

We are pleased to announce the latest preview (0.10) of the Azure Storage Node.js client library. This includes a rich developer experience, full support for AccountSAS capability, IPACL and Protocol specifications for Service SAS along with addressing customer usability feedback. You can start using the Node.js preview Azure Storage library in your applications now by leveraging the storage package on npmjs.

To learn more and get access to the source code, please visit our GitHub repo.

Storage Python Preview Update

We are pleased to announce the latest preview (0.30) of the Azure Storage Python client library. With this version comes all features included in the 2015-04-05 REST version including support for append blobs, Azure File storage, account SAS, JSON table formatting and much more.

Azure Storage Explorer

We are happy to announce the latest public preview of the Azure Storage Explorer. This release adds support for Table Storage including exporting to a CSV file, Queue Storage, AccountSAS and an updated UI experience.

For more information and to download the explorer for the Windows/Linux/Mac platforms, please visit www.storageexplorer.com.

Documentation and Samples Updates

Storage Security Guide

Azure Storage provides a comprehensive set of security capabilities which enable developers to build secure applications. You can secure the management of your storage account, encrypt the storage objects in transit, encrypt the data stored in the storage account and much more. The Azure Storage Security Guide provides an overview of these security features and pointers to resources providing deeper knowledge.

Storage Samples

The Azure Storage team continues to strive towards improving the end-user experience for developers. We have recently developed a standardized set of samples that are easy to discover and enable you to get started in just 5 minutes. The samples are well documented, fully functional, community-friendly, and can be accessed from a centralized landing page that allows you to find the samples you need, for the platform you use. The code is open source and is readily usable from Github making it possible for the community to contribute to the samples repository.